• Business advice: Never make an important business decision with emotion.

Discussing, among other
things, his work with NFL International and his hazy control of French and German,
he muses, comically, for a moment about not knowing Esperanto.

Esperanto?

Glat’s historical
reference is to the name of an unsuccessful, late-19th/early 20th-century movement
to create a universal language. When you speak with Glat you must know the discussion
will explore a multitude of different avenues, some obscure and unexpected.
His job is to look at every possibility and decipher the right one.

As the NFL’s internal
management consultant, he and his team of five are in charge of everything from
planning the league’s Los Angeles re-entry to overseeing the budgeting
of all internal league operations. He had his hands in the NFL’s recent
megasponsorship and licensing deal with Electronic Arts, and is even called
on to help out with TV negotiations.

A former McKinsey consultant,
Glat says his six-person group is more focused than a traditional management
oversight firm like his former employer.

“Whether we are doing
an industry evaluation, trying to understand industry economics, who the key
competitors are, what is driving their business decisions today, some deal-structuring
issues,” the work is more precise, he explained.

And exhaustive. His supervision
of the league’s effort to win back the Los Angeles market is truly a Herculean
task, from working with the four stadium groups, the local government entities
and, of course, the 32 NFL owners he ultimately reports to.

How thorough is Glat?

“Painfully thorough,”
said a chuckling John Moag, the investment banker who represents one of the
sites vying for an NFL team in Los Angeles.

Mitchell Ziets, who is
working with Anaheim’s effort to win a team, said that while Glat is thorough,
his style is easygoing.

“He won’t ask
50 different questions about 50 little points,” Ziets said. “He is
very bright, very poised. He has a pretty good sense of where he needs to be
at the end of the day, whatever deal he is working on.”

The L.A. process has been
slow going, and the league has admitted that its long-standing target of having
a team playing in Los Angeles by 2008 may be pushed to 2009. Is Glat frustrated?

If he is, he won’t
show it.

“It forces you to
get ahead when you are dependent on other people’s schedule,” Glat
said. “Some [of the sites] have gone faster than we initially anticipated;
some have gone slower than we anticipated. That is not frustration. That is
just the course you are dealing with.”

In the last two years,
Glat’s group has assumed the overseeing of the league’s internal budgeting
process. Each group, from media to public relations, now submits its annual
budgets, strategy and goals to Glat for review.

In fact, several NFL teams
have begun replicating his approach.

Glat’s group acts
in a variety of capacities within the NFL. With L.A., it is leading the charge.
With, say, the Electronic Arts deal, it worked more in an advisory capacity.

But even there, Glat had
skills one might not expect. While he would not describe himself as a “gamer,”
he does play video games, saying it can take up to 40 hours to master one. It
would have been difficult, he said, to handle the EA deal without knowing the
product.